Dashed lines

Here's something I came across recently. Open Google Maps in Delhi and look at Kashmir: a solid border, Kashmir drawn simply as part of India. Open the same app from London or Karachi, and that same border goes dashed, marked disputed. Same planet, same company, same data. The line changes depending on where you're standing when you look.

And from inside Delhi, there's no way to know. The line just looks solid. That's what solid lines do.

Hold that. I'll come back to it.

Where this comes from

This question has been living in me for years, mostly because of how my life has unfolded. I've been fortunate to grow within several streams of Buddhism - Thai and Burmese Theravada, Chinese Chan, Tibetan Jonang - alongside a longstanding curiosity about traditions beyond Buddhism. At a high level, the agreement across them is real and moving. And yet the more specific we get about what exactly we're talking about, the less uniform the agreement becomes.

That's when the questions started. Do I have to pick the right one? Is someone here wrong? How can teachers I venerate - accomplished, honest, the real thing - name the deepest things differently? Or is it me, not yet seeing an overlap that's there?

The deepest point of the lever

Right view comes first on the 8fold path, and from what I've seen that ordering really matters. View is the deepest point of the lever. Intention, speech, action, livelihood all come out of it - and so do cultures. What a civilization takes to be ultimately real quietly writes its institutions.

The Buddha framed the middle way beyond 2 extremes, essentialism and nihilism, and civilizations seem to consistently fall toward one or the other. Harden into essences and you get chosen peoples, castes, 'this is simply how things are.' Dissolve into nothing-matters and you get consumption as meaning, and a culture that experiences matter as dead machinery will, given enough time and capital, build factory farms and call it efficiency. (Secularism likes to imagine itself as the absence of a view. It's a view.)

So as this part of the lever became more conscious and explicit for me, I wanted to understand how I relate to it. Below is a bit of that reflection.

The closer you look

Zoom out, and humanity's traditions diverge at the root: a personal creator, a formless One, Brahman that you already are, a living and relational world where the land is kin, no self to be found anywhere. Each of those one-liners is the tip of an iceberg, with ladders of view inside each respective tradition that they come from.

Zoom in, and you'd expect things to settle. They don't. Within Mahayana, lineages disagree about which turning of the wheel is the Buddha's final word, and the same sutras get ranked in opposite order. Within Tibet, whether the ultimate is empty of itself or only empty of what's other than it was contested enough that the Jonang school was nearly erased over it. Within a single school, successive masters sharpen and soften the same view for centuries.

Every lineage draws its own border as solid, at every level of zoom.

What settles it?

Each tradition, of course, has an answer - direct recognition, the view beyond views, what's known once concepts have exhausted themselves. The teachers making these claims are sincere. The reports still differ.

Analysis can't settle it; 2500 years of brilliant, incompatible positions is the evidence. Practice helps enormously, and practice takes you as deep as you've gone. Past that depth, what carries each of us is conviction - a mixture of prior data points (the switchbacks that checked out when we could verify them), our community of practice, felt sense in the body, among other ways of knowing. That's as true of the materialist as the monastic.

Which means each of us is looking at the map from somewhere. And from where we stand, our own lines look solid.

Dashed lines

Here's what the map story has been teaching me. From inside, you can't see your own border as dashed. The only way to see it is to look from somewhere else.

That's what other traditions have become for me. Each one is a vantage point that shows me where my own solid lines are actually in dispute - assumptions I didn't know were assumptions, views running quietly underneath my practice and underneath the culture I grew up in. From the outside, this can look like navel gazing. From the inside, it feels more like excavation, surfacing the personal and collective unconscious one line at a time. A view left unexamined keeps operating. It just operates in the dark.

This isn't relevant simply in the realm of ultimate view.  In some ways, I am an amalgamation of unconscious views that I discover through their coming into contact with that which is otherwise.  My dashed lines slowly coming into awareness, dashed lines sometimes informed by wisdom teachers, more usually through some mystery of proximity and mindless habit.

And a dashed line is still a line. It still marks where I live. It seems to sit right on the middle way: a solid line is essentialism, an erased line is nihilism, and a dashed line holds its place while admitting it's held. I can keep my conviction and walk my path fully, knowing that from another vantage point my map looks different - and that the teacher across the border is looking at theirs the same way.

Okayness

So where does that leave the original questions? Do I have to pick the right one? Maybe less than I thought. Is someone wrong? Maybe, and I'm less sure than I used to be that I'd be the one to know. Is it me, not seeing the overlap? Possibly - and possibly the overlap lives somewhere other than doctrine. The traditions that disagree about the summit largely agree about the trail markers: grasping loosening, fear thinning, kindness coming with less effort. Those are checkable at every mile marker.

What's growing in me is a kind of okayness - with different people working different points of the lever, with approaches that aren't mine, with lines I can't fully see around. That okayness hasn't made the inquiry matter less. If anything, it's what lets the inquiry keep going without needing to win. My teacher was a monastic in one Tibetan lineage for 20 years, until one day he was not, and shifted to Jonang. He didn’t move from wrong to right – the dance was operating more subtly than that.

May whatever good comes of this be for the benefit of all. And may the ‘false solidity’ of our lines remain skillful for our collective self-discovery.